1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ink jet recording material which is more excellent in high-quality feel (touch feel and texture), gloss, color reproduction, and preservation stability of blank portions and printed portions than previous ink jet recording materials, which is excellent in applicability to printing with both dye-based inks and pigment-based inks, and which is excellent for printer conveyance precision.
2. Related Art
In recent years, with the spread of digital cameras, digital photo images have become commonplace and ink jet printers, which are suitable for printing digital photo images, have also rapidly spread. Ink jet recording papers in which an ink absorption layer, a principal component of which is microscopic inorganic microparticles, is provided on a substrate formed of polyolefin resin-covered paper (a substrate in which both faces of a base paper are laminated with a polyolefin resin such as polyethylene or the like) are known and have been marketed as recording materials which are suitable for the printing of photo images.
Now, recording papers with further improvements in glossiness, high-quality feel (touch feel and texture), whiteness, color reproduction characteristics, preservation stability of blank portions and printed portions, and so forth are sought by the market. However, recording papers which have been used hitherto have not achieved satisfactory levels in all these characteristics together.
Meanwhile, it is known that preservation characteristics of printed images (light resistance, gas resistance, etc.) are improved by using pigment-based inks instead of dye-based inks. However, recording papers which are excellent in applicability to printing with dye-based inks have not been satisfactory in applicability to pigment-based inks. For example, there have been problems in that images have a subdued appearance at high-density portions (glossiness is lowered for a dulled appearance) and in that color expression is poor in comparison with dye-based inks. Consequently, recording papers which, in addition to being excellent in high-quality feel (touch feel and texture), whiteness and color reproduction as described above, are excellent in applicability to printing with both dye-based inks and pigment-based inks are sought.
As a technique for raising glossiness of a recording paper, providing a colloidal silica layer at a topmost layer is known. This is described in, for example, JP-A-2003-159862 and the like. An ink jet recording paper in which a Taber stiffness of the substrate is prescribed has been disclosed in JP-A-2004-122710. An ink jet recording paper which includes an fluorescent brightening agent and a white pigment in a thermoplastic resin layer of the substrate has been disclosed in JP-A-2001-310547. Furthermore, including a thioether-based compound in an ink absorption layer has been disclosed in JP-A-2002-86904 and the like.
However, the recording papers described in the above patent references have not been satisfactory in regard to the various above-mentioned characteristics all together.